Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  I was more than a little horrified at the thought that, rather than plaguing my dreams and making my life inconvenient, Allesandro might actually have been genuinely calling out to me. Trying to get a message through. Trying to get help. And all I’d done was continually brush him off.

  I recalled the first hallucination, when I had come home to find Dove tied to my bed, only later it had blurred into Allesandro. Had it been Allesandro the whole time, and Dove had tried to censor his image in my mind’s eye, change it into himself to stop my vampire from talking to me?

  ‘I’m trapped’, he had told me, cuffed to the bed. ‘Don’t you notice anything? They’re keeping me here’. He had said it through Dove’s face, and with Dove’s voice, fighting through the interference?

  ‘I can’t fight back anymore. They’ve taken too much. And I’m not as strong now. Can’t… show you’.

  I looked out over the clouded sky settling into an early sunset, it was beginning to paint the stone buildings all around us with blood. The glass towers of Portmeadow caught the low light, blazing like pillars of fire.

  “I really don’t think he went away…” I said quietly, more to myself than to my companions. “Not willingly anyway. I think he was taken. He’s somewhere in the city, and I think he’s in trouble.” I bit my bottom lip a little with worry. “And I’ve been too bloody angry with him to realise it.”

  What was it he had said the other time I’d seen him? When I’d been recovering at Blue Lab from my run in with the creature at the library.

  ‘It’s taking everything I have left just for this’, he had said, standing in the corner of the room. ‘There isn’t much left anyway. Read between the lines for once. Or do you plan on letting me drain away to nothing?’

  “God, I’m so blind,” I whispered. I looked at Chase. “He’s been asking me for help from the get-go. But… I’ve been so caught up in everything else, the kids, this demon, I’ve been pushing it away, out of my head.”

  “Well you were mad at him,” Lucy said comfortingly. “Cause of how he dumped you, it’s understandable.”

  “For the last time Lucy, he didn’t dump me,” I said. “We were never…there was nothing for us to dump. I was mad at him because he disappeared in the middle of the Tribal crisis. I thought he had just got what he wanted and turned tail. But now I think…he was taken out of the picture.”

  “Because he’s the only one strong enough to stop Dove,” Oscar mused. “He brought Dove back from the edge, back when he rescued him from the human weirdos who kept him caged. He told us, remember? Allesandro fed him with his own blood. He practically re-made him.”

  “This is all fascinating drama and all,” Chase said merrily. “But while you’re having your Elizabeth Bennet revelations about who’s honourable Darcy and who’s dastardly Wickham, night is falling.”

  I agreed. If Allesandro was still in the city somewhere, it was still rather useless if we didn’t know where to find him, or the demon-vampire-ghoul, or the missing children.

  Dove’s vampire-ghoul puppet must be taking them somewhere. There had been nothing in Coldwater’s office to suggest any strange places we hadn’t already thought of either. This city is built on the labyrinth. Fifty percent or more of New Oxford was underground. Countless decommissioned labs, facilities and substations, just like Blue Lab. Leftovers from the early days of Cabal. Forgotten and abandoned. The vampire, or the children, could be squirreled away in any one of them. We could wander around down there in the labyrinth forever and never find what we were looking for.

  There wasn’t time.

  Lucy disappeared inside for a moment, remerging with her bag, from which she withdrew something. “This is the only thing we have to go on, and it doesn’t tell us much.”

  It was the medical wristband. The one from the bridge, which Griff had been gripping in the hologram. I had forgotten I’d sent Lucy to retrieve it this morning.

  “May I?” Chase took it, and inspected the thin strip of plastic, looking over the barcode thoughtfully.

  “I thought it might be from the girl,” I told them all. “Our eyewitness at the second disappearance on the bridge said they saw the demon…” I stopped myself. It was still difficult not to think of it as some kind of biblical monster. “The vampire ghoul that is,” I corrected myself. “Making off with the little Winterbourne girl, but that a second girl appeared out of nowhere. He thought she was a ghost, or an angel. She took Cora and popped right out of existence with her. By all accounts the crispy chap wasn’t best pleased about it. I saw a similar girl, maybe the same one, later on in the library, just before my own run in with the crispy fuck. She appeared and disappeared then too. The way she was dressed. At the time it looked like a toga or something, but now…”

  “Now you’re thinking it might have been a hospital gown?” Chase finished for me. “So, Scary Poppins dropped her ID tag when she stole the prey from Dove’s monster, right, and here it is.”

  He lowered the wristband, smiling at me. “Luckily for you, I am fluent in barcodese.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said flatly to him.

  “Do you even know what a barcode is for? How it works?”

  We all stared at him. I knew that if I swiped my cornflakes at the store, it bleeped and told the machine that there were indeed cornflakes. Although said machine was still frequently both surprised and alarmed to find them unexpectedly in the bagging area.

  Chase sighed, as though we were all bothersome and clueless children.

  “A barcode is a really simple idea,” he told us. “Give every item that you want to classify its own, unique number and then simply print the number on the item so it can be read. I mean, sure, you could simply print the number itself, but the trouble with decimal numbers is that they're easy to confuse. A misprinted eight could look like a three to a computer, while six is identical to nine if you read it the wrong way up.”

  “I get the idea,” I said.

  “If you look at a barcode, you probably can't make head or tail of it. You don't know where one number ends and another one begins. But it's simple really.” Chase was holding it up to the light, inspecting it carefully. “Each digit in the sequence is given the same amount of horizontal space: exactly seven units. Then, to represent any of the numbers from zero through nine, you simply colour those seven units with a different pattern of black and white stripes. Thus, the number one is represented by colouring in two white stripes, two black stripes, two white stripes, and one black stripe, while the number two is represented by two white stripes, one black –“

  “Oh my god! You’re as bad as Doc!”

  I glanced over at Lucy, who was rolling her eyes, looking just shy of a seizure and flopping her arms around uselessly.

  “Stop making me learn really really boring stuff!”

  “So, for the sake of keeping this simple,” Chase continued, ignoring the now groaning girl. “Let's assume that this particular barcode is a simple on-off binary pattern, yes? With each black line corresponding to a one and each white line a zero. As the scanner moves past the barcode, the cell generates a pattern of on-off pulses that correspond to the black and white stripes. An electronic circuit attached to the scanner converts these on-off pulses into binary digits. The binary digits are sent to a computer attached to the scanner, which detects this particular code as-” He took a deep breath. “01110011 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110000 01101000 00110110 00110110 00110110.”

  Chase looked away from the barcode, blowing out his cheeks. He must have noticed our unified, glazed expression.

  “I’ve lost my audience, haven’t I?” he sighed. “Do I need to do some balloon animals to break this up?”

  “Get to the point, Chase,” I said, trying my best to remain as patient as possible with this chirpy, waffling maniac. “You can read it, it’s numbers and letters, right? So what does it actually say?”

  Chase flipped the barcode up in the air and caught it again. “It’s an old Cabal designation co
de sequence. We used to use them back in the day for security access to whatever facility we were working from.”

  “A password, basically,” Lucy summed up. “Encoded in binary.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right, spunky. These days it’s all hologram eyeball scans, blood-drop tests and coffee-breath, but call me old school. You can’t beat a good old punch code ‘password-with-an-@-sign’. Flawless. Harder to fake if you simply don’t know it.”

  “What’s the designation on this bracelet then?” I asked. “All those zeros and ones you just rattled off, what password do they actually make?”

  Chase passed it back to me. “Well, they had a sense of humour at least. It says Seraph666.”

  “Wherever this opens, it could be where these kids are being held,” Lucy pointed out.

  It could be where Allesandro was too, I thought. But knowing that still didn’t do us much good. It’s no use having the key to a door if you don’t know where the damn door was. I said as much to the others.

  Clouds had piled up while we had been talking. Twilight was falling fast, much faster than if the night had been clear.

  “Are you sure Allesandro didn’t say anything else to you?” Oscar tried to jog my memory. “I know he was mentally fighting against Dove at the time, Pheebs, but he didn’t give you any clue where to look, where he was?”

  I racked my brain as they all stared at me. I didn’t think he had. “When I saw him in my apartment,” I explained. “Well, he said a lot of things. It was confusing. He did say there was more than one. This was back when only the Cunningham Bowls girl had been taken. We thought we were dealing with a simple kidnapping. Clearly now I see he was telling us that this had happened to other kids too.” I rubbed my temples, it was hard to focus, feeling the clock ticking away with every moment drawing closer to night. Halloween had never felt more oppressive, more loaded with menace. It rolled out over the city like a silent thunderhead.

  “He… he told me to find them. To find them and to find him. He said they were…encrypted?”

  “Well we have a passcode,” Lucy indicated the bracelet. “So we know the place we need to find is encrypted.”

  Chase held up a hand to silence her, looking thoughtful. “No, wait,” he cut Lucy off. “Allesandro said ‘they’ were encrypted? Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “That’s what I heard. Bear in mind at the time I really just thought I was dreaming or having an episode. Plus, it was a distracting kind of situation to be in, his voice was kind of distant by that point, and pretty muffled.”

  Chase turned and looked over New Oxford, his tongue working around the inside of his cheek, thoughtful.

  “Is it possible that he said, or was trying to say, ‘they’re in crypt’?”

  I frowned. “As in a graveyard?” That wouldn’t make sense. Chase knew as well as I did there wasn’t a single cemetery or graveyard within the walls of New Oxford. Anywhere where people might once have been buried had long since been built on. You died these days, cremation was the way, an urn takes up a lot less space in a walled city. “Chase we don’t have any boneyards here.”

  He turned back to me, his eyes lit up with worrying glee. “No, that’s true. No cemeteries, but we do have a crypt.” He tutted. “I thought you had an interest in history, Doctor? Think about it.”

  I thought about it. For about three seconds. There really wasn’t time for guessing games.

  “Spit it out will you?” I said testily. My nerves were getting the better of me.

  “Where did you find this bracelet? By the river right? Down by Oxford Castle,” he said. “Where did Elise die, where the demon-vamp attacked you? Where Dove literally came out of nowhere to ‘rescue’ you?”

  “Wait, wait I know this,” Oscar said, surprising us all. “There is a crypt, under the castle ruins. The crypt of Saint George.”

  Lucy looked around at each of us, as if she considered us all mad for having any level of basic archaic knowledge.

  Oscar looked embarrassed. “Yeah, I might have done the ghost tour thing, you know…”

  Lucy grinned. “Geek.” She actually punched him affectionately on the arm. “So what, like, there’s an actual saint there? The guy who stabbed dragons and things? Even I’ve heard of that. He killed a dragon with a spear, right?”

  “Depends who you ask, but let’s not split hairs at this point,” Chase shrugged.

  “If the entrance to where we need to be is through that crypt…” I said, taking the medical ID bracelet from Chase. “Then I don’t care which legend you believe. It’s obvious someone has a sense of symbolism anyway. An angelic-named project, Seraph, at the feet of a saint renowned for defeating monsters with a holy spear.” I nodded to the silver brain-spike wire. “Bringing down Genetic Others using this? Surely the modern day equivalent of a celestial lance. If only this weapon hadn’t fallen into the dragon’s hands instead.”

  I turned to go inside, Cloves was still streaming live within. She had her hands full. “If there’s even a chance Allesandro is down there, I have to go now. The parade will be starting soon. We need him if we’re going to stop Dove.”

  “We’re coming too!” Oscar said enthusiastically. I turned, my hand on the door handle.

  “Absolutely not,” I said sharply. I looked from him to Lucy. “Look, I’ve already lost Dee and Griff. I haven’t been able to stop this ghoul taking whatever it wants from me. Lucy, you’re all that’s left, I’m not having you in harm’s way again.”

  “Well, we’re not staying here!” she replied. “I want to help!” She cast around. “I’m going to the parade. Someone should see what’s going to go down, keep an eye on Dove.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Oscar said eagerly. He looked at me and shrugged defiantly. “You’re talking to the city’s two biggest Helsings, Phoebe. Do you honestly think there’s anything that could keep us away from a vampire carnival parade on Halloween night?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Umm, the threat of imminent death?” I suggested.

  Lucy managed a smile. “Doc, this is New Oxford. The threat of imminent death is nothing new.”

  She had a point.

  “I’ll come to the crypt with you,” Chase decided. “Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m no gallant hero protecting the fair maiden here; I’m fairly sure you know how to look after yourself. But I’m awfully curious about what might be down there… for my own use.”

  “Wonderful,” I said dryly. “I’ve always wanted to spend Halloween night in a crypt with a zombie. Now we just need to get there.”

  “We can take Vee’s car,” Chase grinned. “It’s super-fast and awfully fun to drive.”

  “You honestly think Veronica Cloves is going to lend you, of all people, her Ferrari?” I whispered doubtfully.

  He tapped the side of his nose and winked. “Rule one of successful theft, Doctor, is never asking permission.”

  Chapter 29

  I had thought Cloves drove like a demon, but Chase drove with the wild and careless abandon of a man who had already died once and had felt no real long-term consequences. I wondered if that accounted for his devil-may-care attitude to everything. Either that, or maybe the two batty old women who had put him back together were a little carefree when adding caution or common sense to the Frankenstein mixing bowl. They didn’t strike me as being the most responsible scientists I’d ever met, considering they were technically one person twice. Maybe reason had to be split down the middle between them and therefore diluted. We had left Scott Towers in a hail of gravel under screeching tyres, and Pargate’s foot hadn’t lifted from the pedal yet.

  “Jesus Christ, will you be careful!” I said through gritted teeth as we tore out of Portmeadow, down the streets of Jericho and south through the city. Dusk had fallen now and streetlights were winking on everywhere in the deepening gloom, Halloween orange against the cool of the cloudy autumn night air. At least he had the headlights on full beam. It gave people a little more warning and time to
dive out of the way rather than be mown down in the middle of the road.

  “We want to get there fast don’t we?” he said.

  “Preferably in one piece though, and I’d like to leave by the door rather than the windscreen. This is not the time for us to get pulled over by the police for reckless driving.”

  Chase pulled a handbrake turn at a junction, mounting the kerb and churning up the neatly manicured grass of a presentable Jericho park. I was pretty sure he did it on purpose.

  “I think the police have other things to worry about tonight,” he said. “They’ll all be lining the parade route, trying to keep MM and GO supporters away from each other, herding Helsing crowds and keeping everyone who’s angry away from the vampires. They’re going to have their hands full.”

  I couldn’t argue with this. It was the reason we were cutting through the back streets, rather than straight down the main thoroughfare that lead from Portmeadow through to St Giles. The entire parade route had been closed to all traffic tonight.

  I glimpsed the main roads in intermittent flashes along side streets as we hurtled by, the car roaring like a jungle cat. They were packed. It really did look like mardi-gras. There seemed to be a mixed atmosphere. Many were out in a celebratory mood, Helsings a-plenty, Halloween-costumed up to the eyeball and revelling wildly in the Fangfest fun. But there were also hordes of picketers, protesters, placard-carrying citizens with angry faces, more than one of whom held aloft signs bearing the photographs of the three abducted girls. There would be more trouble the further along the parade they got, outside the unofficial borders of the vampire district and in the heart of the city. I was expecting Molotov cocktails to be honest. It wouldn’t take much pushing for the energetic street-carnival to devolve into a full on panicked riot. There were reporters everywhere, no doubt to capture the whole spectacle on tape.

  “What do you think he’s planning to do? Dove I mean. If he really is the one behind the abductions. Holding this parade, when there’s such uproar in the city, he’s only putting all his vampires in harm’s way. I don’t understand it.”